Bitcoin’s Moment: Bitcoin may reach $100 today. That brings the total value of the existing Bitcoin stock (10,...

Well, it’s good as an analogy, but it is both more complicated and more amazing. The numbers are not literally property (from the Austrian perspective), even though they allow control. The functional difference is, apart from some corner cases which are not really important, negligible. It’s kind of like your own thoughts: you don’t really own them, but you can control how you act upon them. Bitcoin simulates the function of property rights without actually there being rights. We can thus use it as if there were property rights. Also, Bitcoin allows things which sound like science fiction. You can have balances in a “m of n keys” accounts. With this, say, three people to “own” a balance together, and in order to use the balance, two people out of three need to agree. One alone cannot use the balance. You can theoretically do this with a bank, but you need to rely on the ba...